The Applicant by Nazlı Koca

´I was so intoxicated by Berlin that I didn´t even smell the puke, the piss, the poverty´.

A young leftist Turkish lady, Leyla, is trying to find her way through writing in Berlin, while working part time as a cleaning lady in a hostel, getting intoxicated on drugs and alcohol and waiting for the infamous Foreigner´s Authorty - Ausländerbehörde, for the connoisseurs - to decide her fate. Her university rejected her graduation paper and she is tolerated until the confict with the university is clarified. 

The Applicant by Nazlı Koca sounds like a typical Made in Berlin story. I live in this city for almost two decades and I´ve met my fair amount of people sharing Leyla´s destiny. Also, I know from my own experience the pain of having to do with Ausländerbehörde - in the book, the procedures are correctly described. 

Her story, told as diary entries in 2017, is a tragi-comical story of making your way through the literary world, as an immigrant woman writer. Leyla is in the wrong place, with the wrong people, forcing herself to survive in another language. She is using any escape from reality - including soap operas - to survive. She fantasizes about the possible lives of the people she hooks up with. 

Maybe because I am so familiar with such stories, on a regular non-fictional basis, I wasn´t fully charmed by the story. It sounded to real to be fictional, unless towards the end of book when it is becoming a bit more abstract and reflexive. But I suppose for someone not living here it sounds as pure fiction and this is what Berlin life may be sometimes. Unless it is too repetitive and overrated but we all love a bit of drama. Berlin drama, of course.

Rating: 3 stars